As communication technologies, such as the Internet, and interactive technologies, such as a video-on-demand service, increasingly rely on more information-rich types of media to enhance their popularity and/or capabilities, there is an increasing need to process such information. Processing may be configured to, for example, capture, analyze, segment, index, retrieve, and/or distribute the massive amount of information contained within the types of media used within these technologies to help users sift through the content and find the portion(s) that will be of most interest. However, due to the massive amount of information within media (e.g., a single day's worth of television programming may contain thousands and thousands of hours of content, addressing thousands and thousands of topics, narrative themes, etc.), attempting to capture, analyze, segment, index, retrieve and/or distribute information from a static document may be extremely difficult. Therefore, the processing of certain types of information-rich media files is often performed using manual judgments and determinations. For example, producers of the television show “60 Minutes” may manually generate a textual description of the news segments appearing in this week's episode, identify the three stories to be run in tonight's episode, and provide that textual description to broadcasters. That description can then be provided to users, and can be searched using simple text searches to find programs containing topics of interest. Users can then record those programs.
This approach, however, is not perfect. Content producers do not always provide descriptions, or sufficiently detailed descriptions. The summary or descriptions may be lacking; it may, for example, identify a single segment as being “discussing the latest tax proposal in Congress,” and fail to provide additional details (e.g., the formal title or number of a piece of legislation, its sponsor, etc.) that may be useful in supporting a meaningful search by the user. Thus, there remains an ever-present need to provide more useful information to users, for example, to provide for the capture, analysis, segmentation, indexing, retrieval and distribution of information related to media with greater functionality, accuracy and speed.